Course Overview
Hi everyone, my name is Ross Bagurdes and welcome to my course, Troubleshooting Essentials. I'm a network engineer with 20 years experience in building and managing enterprise networks and teaching people about them. Troubleshooting can be an overwhelming topic, but the more knowledge you have about the details of a system's operation, the more effective troubleshooter you can become. Some of the major topics we will cover include basic troubleshooting methodology as well as discuss some flexibility that we have when we're doing troubleshooting. We'll also introduce Cisco Discovery Protocol and learn how we can use CDP to map a network with very little knowledge about that network to begin with, and we're going to wrap up the course looking at some common errors when we're working with networks. By the end of this course you'll have a method to do troubleshooting, as well as motivation to learn the details of the protocols that make data networking operate. Before beginning this course, I recommend that you complete the previous courses in the CCNA Series, and from this course, it's going to help us move along into the future courses in the CCNA Series. I hope you'll join me on this journey to learn troubleshooting with the Troubleshooting Essentials course at Pluralsight. (ambient music)

Troubleshooting Methodology
Welcome to Pluralsight, I'm Ross Bagurdes. This is Troubleshooting Essentials for the Cisco CCNA 200-125 exam, and the 100-105 exam. These are the CCNA and ICND1 exams respectively. This first module, we're going to look at troubleshooting methodology. My goals for you in this module, are to talk about how troubleshooting is not a straight line. If only it could be so simple. We're going to talk about troubleshooting and how we need to understand the technology we're working with to be a good, effective troubleshooter. I'm going to give you a very simple troubleshooting methodology that you can repeat again, and again, and again. You may already be using it, if you are working in the industry doing IT troubleshooting. We're going to talk about the idea of resolve or escalate. Sometimes no matter how many resources of our own we put into trying to solve a problem, we just don't have the right tools, experience or other stuff to solve the problem. So we may need to escalate that problem to somebody else. We'll talk about the conditions on when and why we would need to do that. And then, in the end, we're going to look at how we implement solutions. Mainly how we implement solutions without disrupting other systems in our environment.

Flexibility with Troubleshooting
Welcome to Pluralsight, I'm Ross Bagurdes. Let's jump into the second module of Flexibility with Troubleshooting. My goals this module for you are to Review the troubleshooting method, take a look at some Troubleshooting flexibility, specifically with relation to the OSI Model and how protocols interact with each other. Give you some guidelines for Troubleshooting, as well as guidelines for Documentation of issues. Our Troubleshooting method from the previous module was to Identify the problem, Brainstorm the cause of that problem, and then Test to see if the cause that you brainstormed actually is the source of the problem. And, if that doesn't work, if your test doesn't work and it fails, well then we lather rise, repeat, right? We just keep repeating this process until we do solve the problem.

Neighbor Discovery
Welcome to Pluralsight, I'm Ross Bagurdes, this is Neighbor Discovery. Let's look at our module goals here. What I want to do is I want to examine the neighbor discovery protocols, specifically, CDP and LLDP. I then want to go demonstrate those protocols, we can see them in action, see what they do, see what kind of information they provide. And then, last, we're going to build a network map using only CDP. So, I'm going to have a network environment set up, with several routers, and switches, and our job is going to be to go on to each device, log on to it, use the CDP information, to build the map of how everything is connected together.

Cisco Network Design Model
Welcome to Pluralsight. I'm Ross Bagurdes. This module is Cisco Network Design Model. Cisco Systems has a specific model that they like engineers to use when designing networks. Part of the reason for that is to build a very resilient, redundant, highly available network. Another part of it is to sell you lots of Cisco gear. So let's take a look at that model and find out what it's all about. Our goals, this module are simple. We're simply going to examine the Cisco Network Design Model.

Check Your Knowledge
Welcome to Pluralsight, I'm Ross Bagurdes. Let's wrap up this troubleshooting course with a Check Your Knowledge module about troubleshooting. What I'd like to do in this module is examine some misconfigured IP addresses, which is one of the number one issues that I see with students when they're first learning data networking. So we'll look at what a misconfigured IP address looks like on a PC, as well as on a router. We're going to use the ping utility to verify our connectivity, to make sure things are working as we expect them to. We're going to examine the behavior of some misconfigured cables, as well as examine a speed and duplex issue with a switch.